Clearing things out digitally:

Oct 13, 2008 17:18


My main computer (the one on my desktop) has been giving me fits for a number of reasons, one big one being storage space - and the lack of it.  I have too much stuff, and one drive that was supposed to be an archive drive has been giving me fits along the lines of ‘maybe I’ll give you that file and maybe I won’t', so I’ve been trying to empty it out and test it, and then reformat or replace it.  This is not a quick task when it burps on me a lot, and it took days, on and off.   The drive in question is the oldest drive on the system, one I originally got as a portable ‘backup’ for the various house computers at a time when we were transitioning to a new set of computers.

Since Susan and I do a lot of telecommuting (in my case, that’s what I’ve been doing for the best part of a year 100% of the time and before that about 45% of the time), having beefy setups that will do what we want are pretty paramount. And this also means high capacities for storing a lot of digital stuff - documents, web work, scans, images, and the like.  Oh, yes - video and audio files.

Practically everything in the way of papers or photos or movies or whatever is being digitized.   Susan spent the entirely of Sunday scanning Mere memorabilia.  I spend a huge amount of time scanning all of the bills and paperwork in the house, and my BIG task is to digitize out the archives here.   Old fanzines, old clippings, letters, tapes, VCR stuff and so on.  Huge task.  But doing so is radically cutting down the amount of stuff around here.

Now, try organizing out all of your stuff like that, including photos, clippings and so on.  It’s a big task.

In regards to that hard drive, I did a number of tests on it after the stuff got off, and found errors up the boo-boo with the manufacturer’s diagnostics.  A quick dig on google and newegg found lots of people saying ‘it’s cheap, and it fails a lot’. And it’s out of warranty.  So I reluctantly went over to Frys’ this afternoon and got a new 500GB SATA as a replacement, and junked the broken puppy.   Right now, I’m doing all the basic tests on the new drive to make sure it’s good before I start the format.

organization, winxp, computers, tech, finance, website_org, daoffice, documents

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